Once upon a time, Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com> said:
> You'd have to do locking, which I noted the problems with (NFS in
> particular) in my other mail.
I was ignoring that. I was presuming write locking was already being
done somewhere; I just described what would have to be done to have
atomic updates such that the data stays internally consistent across a
crash.
Reading would also require locks, unless you can only fetch a single
value at a time.
Basically, trying to use the filesystem to implement a transactional
database is not a good idea. If you want a transactional database, use
a transactional database library (i.e. BDB) and supply a few
command-line dump and restore type tools for emergency editing (as long
as the database doesn't get internally corrupted).
--
Chris Adams <cmadams hiwaay net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.